


Un-alone

by BrosleCub12



Category: History Boys (2006), History Boys - All Media Types
Genre: Affection, Depression Recovery, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-12
Updated: 2017-08-12
Packaged: 2018-12-14 14:49:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11785407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrosleCub12/pseuds/BrosleCub12
Summary: 'It will pass.'





	Un-alone

**Author's Note:**

> What can I say? I find a lot of comfort from this particular line of Scripps'.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own the History Boys.

* * *

 

In the days after Posner comes out of hospital, there are hours when there’s simply a lot of silence between them.

There’s bike-rides; Posner takes to it in shaky stead, his hands slipping on the handlebars and they laugh about it, briefly; books and sandwiches, a far few walks, Posner huddles in his jacket that’s now one size too big for him, already skinnier than he was before… _before_ and Scripps with his own hanging over his shoulder, so casually _himself_ that it’s comforting, in the way few things are.

It’s the summer between their second and third at Oxford and Posner is feeling so frightened about it, it’s almost hilarious – might be, in the eyes of Dakin and Lockwood, if they had the heart to laugh about it (it’s not, not to anyone. Nothing about this is even remotely hilarious).

It’s August, the month before they’re due to go back to Oxford and he’s staring at himself in the mirror above the mantelpiece in his parents’ living room – hard to think of it as home, he’s not sure why, maybe because he’s been spending every last, desperate hour breathing the ‘fresh air’ into his lungs, bearable only with Scrippsy and occasionally Akthar, who’s been travelling most of the summer but sending postcards, dropping in when he’s able; he even has a ‘get well’ card from Rudge, clumsily written but appreciated and it had come with a massive box of Cadbury that he and Scripps had shared underneath one of their trees, in the park. They had fought over the caramel.

He’s trying to save up for a typewriter; it might be good for him. He had told Scripps this, in a rare disclosure, something almost _normal_ outside the therapist’s office and his mother hiding anything remotely sharp and talking about his _feelings_ and Scripps had grinned, conspiratorially and had lead him down to the local second-hand shop where some typewriter or another always graced the window with its presence. They had stared at it, stared at the price and then stared some more.

‘Fight you for it,’ Scripps had decided finally, for both of them and they had shaken on it.

He eyes the bags under his eyes (ha, there’s a sentence to give the headmaster a heart-attack, he still floundering at the school that they’ve long since left behind them, and whom he and Scripps charged into a lingerie shop to avoid a few weeks ago when they saw him on the high street) and wonders if anything will ever be good for him again. If he can be good for anyone, the way that poetry is good for all. He’s tried writing some, but even for him, it all feels so self-involved; the words _I_ and _me_ all over the page. More than that, the antidepressants they’ve put him on seem to have stemmed the flow. It’s better, with the familiars; the well-knowns.

Scripps hasn’t even complained about it; senses the need for it. Posner had told him, haltingly, almost embarrassed, what Hector had told him three years ago almost, the hand reaching out through history, grasping their own – his, Hector’s, anyone’s, that tribute to Drummer Hodge, buried just as found. He had wondered if that counted as a betrayal to the man’s memory, whether it was really his to tell, but Scripps, leaning back against the tree, had contemplated this and then shrugged.

‘Wouldn’t mean anything otherwise, I suppose,’ he’d smiled at Posner, but had seemed to parse on that all the same – before his hand had reached out to grasp Posner’s, like an anchor, as though sensing that in the silence he would drift away again.  

He can’t write the hand. He can’t _be_ the hand if he can barely keep his head and shoulders above the water and he’s trying, he really is. He’s tired though; there’s something oddly poetic in the deep sludge of days, made only swimmable by Scripps, and grass beneath his feet and the temptation to go back to bed (although that last one has dwindled considerably, he’s noticed recently, the heavy lump of the duvet replaced by the hooded shade of the park, Scripps beside him). There’s a whole anthology there, if he could find the right words. They could study it for years; schools all over the world could dissect his state of mind.

He wonders if Scripps had anything planned for the summer; a church outing, maybe, holidays with his parents? He never asked; just leaned on him and Scripps let him.

 _No wonder Dakin never loved me,_ he thinks, a harsh, childish thought that Scripps would hit him for, if he voiced it out loud; it must get slightly irritating, rather like love itself. It does for Posner; Scripps tends to take that day’s newspaper to his head and to be fair, it can’t get any more battered than it already is. Anyway, Scripps is always careful enough, a swat rather than anything else, flouncing his hair without real harm.

It has to stop, soon. Summer isn’t permanent and they’re at different colleges, after all – he with Akthar, Dakin and Scripps the ones strolling the grass somewhere else, Scripps always kind enough for the both of them, Posner’s constant bridge and constant faithful to getting noticed by someone who’s never going to notice him back, beyond a casual, cutting comment, making him the easy target for wit, which he already welcomed anyway. Nothing less, nothing more.

 _If I could get those tired eyes to wake up,_ he thinks now, eyeing the grey, _I would be a lot less_ _worried_ and then smiles cryptically at his own devastated imagination. Now that’s a poem worth writing down; maybe he should.

What could Don possibly get out of this? He’s too ruined by half – by his mistakes, by the burden of a workload everyone else seemed able to take, by burdens of himself no-one else seems to have, by those fucking antidepressants –

A pair of arms latch around his shoulders, the pianist’s hands and the dip in the muscles of the forearm unmistakable and obviously he’s disappeared again, has heard nothing, because Scripps has managed to slip inside the house, unseen, with the key Posner’s mother has given him, taken in the scene and decided to take things – or Posner, rather – into his own hands with a half-amused chuff of ‘No, c’mere,’ the quiet noise a sudden burst of sound in the room, exploding in Posner’s own head with the shock of warm contact.

Scripps’ arms are wrapped easily around Posner’s forearms and chest and he presses close against Posner’s shoulder, half-exasperated, half smiling at Posner’s superhuman ability to shut everything out. He’s still not quite as tall as Pos, who remains those couple of inches higher than him but he’s broad, his chest and belly full of health and education and he’s solid and _there,_ holding Posner up and close.

His grin is as easy as ever, but his eyes, when they meet in the mirror, are extremely bright, very focused.

_Don’t you go anywhere._

Posner swallows and eyes the ceiling, feeling welcome warmth at his back, through the jumper he decided on today that’s blue and that he swims in slightly and rather reminds him of one that Scripps owned, once upon a time. Then he says it; a warning.

‘I might not get better.’

‘It’ll pass,’ Scripps replies casually, propping his chin on Posner’s shoulder. Posner parses on that – will it, though? – but Scripps, as ever, sounds so sure of himself, like he’s sure of God and poets and scripture.

And after all, it’s been weeks since Posner stopped eyeing the telephone for that possible call from Dakin; somehow accepted it, without truly realising, that one visit in the hospital at the beginning was all he would get.

‘Pos,’ Scripps murmurs, bringing him back to himself, ‘It will pass.’

 _‘You_ could go away,’ Posner tells him, focusing on leaning back a little to look at him, the side of his face, his glinting eyes, rather than simply his reflection; the actual man, rather than the image. He tries not to shake at the thought, tries not to make it sound like a dismissal. Anxiety and depression do make one rather selfish – he’s oddly proud of for acknowledging that even to himself – and Scripps has never been selfish a day in his life. _Little victories,_ his therapist tells him and this could count as one, if timed right.

Scripps, for his part, touches his mouth to the shoulder of Posner’s jumper briefly, comfortingly, seeming to consider that. ‘Nah,’ he answers finally and Posner tries not to let it down him, the sheer relief, tries not to let himself collapse in Scripps’ arms with it. The embarrassing part is that Scripps would probably _let_ him.

‘You know, _I_ might not graduate from Oxford,’ Scripps throws out then, quite pointedly not going anywhere, sounding not the least bit put out by the prospect of such a thing even though it’s impossible, he’s clever, one of the cleverest people Posner knows.

He raises a hand, puts it to the one of those locked around him. His Mum hugs him too much; his Dad not at all. Surviving something terrible is in his family’s blood, but it seems to have stopped with him.

Or maybe not, considering he _did_ survive, after all – even if, all these weeks later, he can’t quite answer to exactly what he was doing at the time. Now _there’s_ a kind thought, he notes, one that sounds like Scripps himself.

‘Do all Christians like to spend their time on their small, disordered Jewish friends?’ he asks finally and Scripps’ laugh, an almost delighted thing, almost relieved, shakes them both.

‘Only the good ones,’ he chuckles, reaching for Posner’s hands to give them a quick, companionable squeeze and Posner, smiling wryly, leaves it; turns around in his arms to fall into them properly.  

*

They don’t go out that day, not with the impending rain outside; instead, they lie down on opposite sides of the sofa, covered by a rug that Posner’s grandmother made and is a precious family relic, watch _Brief Encounter (_ Scripps will cheerfully admit his half-hearted envy of Posner’s parents’ taste in films), eat toast and simply hold each other’s hands across faded but soft material.

When the rain does come, it batters down on the roof, high above their heads but they simply turn up the volume, Scripps murmurs a few half-hearted lines of the ‘Water of Life’ while pretending to play the accompanying harmony in midair, and Posner laughs and feels better.

*

 


End file.
